Individuals are more likely to remember emotional than neutral information, but this benefit does not always extend to the surrounding background information. This memory narrowing is theorised to be linked to the availability of attentional resources at encoding. In contrast to the predictions of this theoretical account, altering participants' attentional resources at encoding by dividing attention did not affect emotion-induced memory narrowing. Attention was divided using three separate manipulations: a digit ordering task (Experiment 1), an arithmetic task (Experiment 2) and (...) an auditory discrimination task (Experiment 3). Across all three experiments, divided attention decreased memory across the board but did not affect the degree of memory narrowing. These findings suggest that theories to explain memory narrowing must be expanded to include other potential mechanisms beyond the limitations of attentional resources. (shrink)

When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would (...) be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting. (shrink)

This chapter documents the progress that has been made in our understanding of how people remember emotional events, but also highlight substantial gaps in our knowledge. It demonstrates that, in a wide range of circumstances, emotion promotes memory for all event's “central” materials, but also emotion seems to have the opposite effect, undermining memory, in terms of details at an event's “periphery”. However, this latter effect may be produced not by emotion itself but by the presence of powerful “attention magnets” (...) found within some emotional events. The chapter then explores possible limits of this data pattern, with an eye on how different types and different strengths of emotion may influence memory differently. In general, emotion seems to have a positive effect on memory, increasing memory vividness, accuracy, completeness, and longevity. On the other hand, extremely intense emotions may work against memory, perhaps by interrupting the biological processes needed for memory consolidation. The available evidence directly challenges some long-held and often-quoted claims, including the Yerkes-Dodson law and the Easterbrook hypothesis of arousal and memory. (shrink)